CIAO DATE: 08/2014
Volume: 43, Issue: 2
August 2014
Editorial (PDF)
Karsten Griese
Editorial to the Journal of Current Chinese Affairs 2/2014.
Western-Chinese Academic Collaboration in the Social Sciences (PDF)
Sascha Klotzbucher
Introduction to Journal of Current Chinese Affairs 2/2014: Western-Chinese Academic Collaboration in Social Sciences
Heike Holbig
For more than two decades, the National Planning Office for Philosophy and Social Sciences (NPOPSS) has been managing official funding of social science research in China under the orbit of the Communist Party of China’s (CPC) propaganda system. By focusing on “Major Projects”, the most prestigious and well-funded program initiated by the NPOPSS in 2004, this contribution outlines the political and institutional ramifications of this line of official funding and attempts to identify larger shifts during the past decade in the “ideologics” of official social science research funding – the changing ideological circumscriptions of research agendas in the more narrow sense of echoing party theory and rhetoric and – in the broader sense – of adapting to an increasingly dominant official discourse of cultural and national self-assertion. To conclude, this article offers reflections on the potential repercussions of these shifts for international academic collaboration.
Doris Fischer
Over the past three decades, China’s fast economic development has induced considerable changes in China’s university and research institution landscape, research financing and academic career incentives. This paper argues that these changes have affected the motivation and the ways in which Chinese scholars engage in international research cooperation. Most recently it has been observed that strong pressures on scholars and scientists – especially at leading academic institutions – to excel in international publications while simultaneously fulfilling their obligation to generate income for their institutions can lead to a dilemma with regard to international research cooperation: Those institutions and scholars most interesting for foreign scholars to cooperate with may be the ones with the least amount of both incentive and time to enter into serious cooperation. This article invites us to reflect on the implications of these changes in the incentive structure for cooperation in social science research on China.
Changes in International Research Cooperation in China: Positive Perspectives (PDF)
Josef Gregory Mahoney
This paper discusses how cooperation between Chinese researchers and their foreign counterparts has changed. The paper draws on current literature and the author’s experience as a researcher in the US and in China, arguing that while cooperation has increased overall, it has done so in ways that have crowded out old forms of cooperation or made them passé. The paper focuses particularly on how changes at leading Chinese research institutions have impacted international cooperation, both positively and negatively, and suggests ways in which foreign scholars might effectively pursue new avenues for cooperation and exchange.
"Embedded Research" in Collaborative Fieldwo (PDF)
Sascha Klotzbucher
In the era of the “scientific development concept” of the Hu/Wen leadership, agents of knowledge transfer that eventually translates into policy comprise not only think tanks for policy formulation in central-state institutions but also researchers in universities supporting policy implementation at local levels. Well-established patterns of local scientific advisory frame collaborative fieldwork in Sino-Western scientific projects on local governance. However, there is a gap between our active integration into these patterns during fieldwork and our ability to clarify them as resources, reconstruct the selection of research topics and contextualize the research results within our academic discourses. Analysing site-finding, data collection, aggregation and dissemination of a research project with Chinese public health researchers on rural health service reform in Xinjiang between 2005 and 2010, I argue that fieldwork and the role performed as a scientific advisor for the political principal is the localized and daily interface where politics crosses into science.
Let's Not Go There: Coping with (Pre-) Selection Bias in Collaborative Field Research (PDF)
Christian Gobel
Field research in China often requires the researcher to cooperate with two kinds of actors: research collaborators, such as those at universities or official think tanks, and local officials. These actors facilitate or enhance field access, but such access comes at the price of a potential “pre-selection bias” in data collection. Some scholars have argued that dependence on these “gatekeepers” introduces a significant bias into research outcomes. I argue, however, that the constraints faced by China scholars in their field studies are not absolute, but function by degree. The CCP is monolithic neither in its organization nor in the thoughts of its agents, and close collaboration with local partners can help remove normative bias rather than necessarily introducing it. Most importantly, an argument built exclusively on the power of structural constraints discounts China scholars’ most crucial abilities: to learn, to think critically and to research holistically.
Ya-ning Kao
This paper examines two cases of Zhuang religious revival involving multiple actors. It shows how consideration of “superstition” (迷信, mixin) places some religious practice outside the institutional framework when discussing the modern concept of religion in China. In this paper, I particularly focus on two main dimensions of religious revival among the Zhuang people. The first is a grassroots dimension that involves the revival of a so-called “superstitious” cult in which Zhuang people along the Sino-Vietnamese border carry out shamanic rituals to make offerings to a powerful chief-turned-deity, Nong Zhigao, and his wife. The second dimension is a top-down dynamic and involves a series of projects conducted by Zhuang officials, scholars and business persons, which aim to standardize a Zhuang religion, known as Mo religion. These two cases of religious revival demonstrate the varied strategies utilized by different actors in response to government policies regarding religion in China.
Of Canons and Commodities: The Cultural Predicaments of Nuosu-Yi "Bimo Culture" (PDF)
Olivia Kraef
The Nuosu are a subgroup of the so-called Yi ethnic group. Today around two million Nuosu live in Liangshan Autonomous Prefecture in Sichuan Province and translocal urban contexts, such as Chengdu and Beijing. For many centuries, the Nuosu have cultivated a belief system composed of a combination of animism and ancestor worship. Since the resurrection of religious activity across China that began in the early 1980s, this faith – represented by the three types of religious practitioners known as bimo, sunyi, and monyi – has reportedly been experiencing a comprehensive revival at folk level. For the bimo, this revival has been paralleled and increasingly overlaid by a scholarly reappraisal of Nuosu religion under premises other than religious. Bimo practice and identity have thus become subsumed under the illustrious concept of “bimo culture”. In this article, I trace the genealogy of the concept of “bimo culture” as part of a cultural canon of and for the Yi which is intended to promote development at the local level but which is also contributing to a weakening of the status of the bimo and Nuosu ritual life in Liangshan today.
Re-Fusing Ethnicity and Religion: An Experiment on Tibetan Grounds (PDF)
Martin Saxel
The relation between ethnicity and religion has had a troubled history in the People’s Republic of China. Conflating religious practice with ethnic culture is considered to carry the risk of breeding “splittism” – especially in Tibet and Xinjiang. While in the post-Mao era the outright hostility against religion has given way to a religious revival, keeping religion and (nationality) politics separate has remained a major concern for the Chinese Communist Party. Religion is supposed to be a private matter that does not interfere with pol-itics. Against this backdrop, a recent phenomenon in the Tibet Autonomous Region is all the more remarkable: the (re-)fusion of ethnicity and religion under the label of cultural heritage and its protection. This paper approaches this officially endorsed re-fusion ethno-graphically and examines its wider implications. I argue that endorsing religion as an attribute of Tibetan heritage corresponds to the concept of defining public spaces and events in which religious practice is legitimate and expected. Simultaneously, religious practices outside these dedicated spaces and events become even more problematic, leading to everyday Buddhist practices, such as circumambulation, being seen as (and performed as) political acts.